Reader’s Guide to This Fall’s Big Book Awards

By The New York Times

Oct. 3, 2016

It’s that time of year when the literary world hands out its biggest prizes. Next week’s announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature will be followed by the awarding of the Man Booker Prize later in October and the National Book Awards in November. Here’s a guide to the finalists for the honors — and the chatter about who might win the Nobel.

Nobel Prize in Literature

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The Syrian-born poet Adonis.CreditFabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Oct. 13, a week later than usual. The voting process is a closely guarded secret, but that never stops readers from scrambling to figure out who might be next to receive the honor. (Last year’s winner, Svetlana Alexievich, was one of the rare nonfiction writers to take home the medal.) Two familiar names sit atop this year’s odds board, according to the British-based gambling site Ladbrokes: the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and the Syrian poet Adonis.

They are followed by Philip Roth, who would be the first American to win the award since Toni Morrison in 1993, though he may not have helped his chances with this comment in a 2014 interview: “I wonder if I had called ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ ‘The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism,’ if I would thereby have earned the favor of the Swedish Academy.”

Other names on the list include Joyce Carol Oates, the Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare and the Spanish novelist Javier Marías.

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Man Booker Prize

The six Booker finalists were drawn from an earlier longlist, and the winner will be announced on Oct. 25. In 2014, the prize, which had previously been limited to writers from Britain, Ireland, the Commonwealth and Zimbabwe, changed its rules to include submissions from any author whose work was published in Britain and was first written in English. This year’s six finalists:

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“The Sellout” by Paul Beatty

Beatty’s bold satire about race in America was one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2015. In the Book Review, Kevin Young wrote about the novel in the context of the history of black satire. He said Beatty takes “delight in tearing down the sacred, not so much airing dirty laundry as soiling it in front of you.” Dwight Garner wrote that the first third of the book “reads like the most concussive monologues and interviews of Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle wrapped in a satirical yet surprisingly delicate literary and historical sensibility.”

“Hot Milk” by Deborah Levy

Levy’s novel is about a young woman named Sofia who has traveled to Spain with her mother, Rose, in search of a cure for Rose’s possibly psychosomatic ailments. In The Times, Sarah Lyall called the book “gorgeous,” and wrote: “It’s a pleasure to be inside Sofia’s insightful, questioning mind.” In the Book Review, Leah Hager Cohen expressed mixed feelings: “As a series of images, the book exerts a seductive, arcane power, rather like a deck of tarot cards, every page seething with lavish, cryptic innuendo. Yet, as a narrative it is wanting.”

“His Bloody Project” by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Burnet’s novel about a triple murder in 19th-century Scotland will be published in the U.S. on Oct. 18. It starts with a confession, so it’s not a whodunit but a whydunit. “My primary interest is in the psychology of the character,” Burnet recently told The Wall Street Journal, “rather than the mystery of what’s happened.”

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“Eileen” by Ottessa Moshfegh

One of the most widely praised debuts by an American writer this year, Moshfegh’s novel is about a young woman working at a juvenile detention center in New England in the 1960s. On the cover of the Book Review, Lily King praised Moshfegh’s sentences as “playful, shocking, wise, morbid, witty, searingly sharp,” and said that as a character Eileen is “as vivid and human as they come.”

“All That Man Is” by David Szalay

Szalay’s novel is composed of nine narratives with different male protagonists. In the Book Review, Garth Greenwell praised the novel, while questioning its label: “The publisher calls ‘All That Man Is’ a novel, but there’s very little explicitly interlinking its separate narratives. The stories cohere instead through their single project: an investigation of European manhood.”

“Do Not Say We Have Nothing” by Madeleine Thien

Thien’s latest novel, which will be published in the U.S. on Oct. 11, traces the effects of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, from Mao’s rise to the Tiananmen Square protests. It follows three musician friends through the country’s changes.

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The National Book Awards

The National Book Awards are given in four categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature. The longlists of 2016 finalists have been announced. The shortlists will be announced on Oct. 6 (moved up from the earlier announced date of Oct. 13), with the winners to follow on Nov. 16.

The National Book Awards longlist for fiction:

(Update: The following books were announced as shortlist finalists for this award: “The Throwback Special” by Chris Bachelder, “News of the World” by Paulette Jiles, “The Association of Small Bombs” by Karan Mahajan, “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead and “Another Brooklyn” by Jacqueline Woodson.)

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“The Throwback Special” by Chris Bachelder

Bachelder’s fourth novel follows a group of middle-aged men as they reunite for the 16th straight year of an odd ritual: re-enacting one of the most iconic and gruesome plays in football history, when the Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor sacked the Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann in 1985, shattering Theismann’s leg and ending his career. In the Book Review, John Williams wrote that the novel’s “imaginative freshness allows for sly new questions to be implicitly asked about men’s relationship to sports, to violence, to nostalgia and to one another.”

“What Belongs to You” by Garth Greenwell

In this debut novel, a gay American poet narrates his experience in Bulgaria, where homosexuality remains a cultural taboo. Dwight Garner called it an “incandescent” book, in which “an old tale is made new, and made punishing.” In the Book Review, Aaron Hamburger praised it as “a rich, important debut, an instant classic to be savored by all lovers of serious fiction because of, not despite, its subject: a gay man’s endeavor to fathom his own heart.”

“Imagine Me Gone” by Adam Haslett

Haslett’s second novel centers on Michael, a man who has inherited his father’s psychological instability. In the Book Review, Bret Anthony Johnston wrote: “By putting the readers in the same position as Michael’s family members, Haslett has pulled off something of a brilliant trick: We feel precisely what they feel — the frustration, the protectiveness, the hope and fear and, yes, the obligation.”

“News of the World” by Paulette Jiles

In this historical novel, being published in the U.S. this week, an elderly war veteran in 1870s Texas goes on a long journey with a 10-year-old orphan, hoping to return her to relatives in San Antonio.

“The Association of Small Bombs” by Karan Mahajan

Mahajan’s second novel examines the effects of a terrorist bombing in Delhi on the families of two young boys who were killed. Fiona Maazel, in the Book Review, started her assessment like this: “Allow me to skip the prelude to judgment that usually begins a book review, and just get right to it: Karan Mahajan’s second novel, ‘The Association of Small Bombs,’ is wonderful. It is smart, devastating, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. If you enjoy novels that happily disrupt traditional narratives — about grief, death, violence, politics — I suggest you go out and buy this one. Post haste.”

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“The Portable Veblen” by Elizabeth McKenzie

Jennifer Senior called McKenzie’s latest novel “a screwball comedy with a dash of mental illness; a conventional tale of family pathos; a sendup of Big Pharma; a meditation on consumption, marriage, the nature of work.” It also includes a squirrel that may or may not be communicating with the lead character. In the Book Review, Patricia Park said McKenzie “adroitly skirts the line between the plausible and the absurd.”

“Sweet Lamb of Heaven” by Lydia Millet

A woman in Alaska flees her politically ambitious husband, with her daughter in tow, in the prolific Millet’s latest novel. In the Book Review, Laura Lippman wrote: “I have little patience with literary novels that claim to have the propulsive momentum of a thriller, yet Millet pulls it off.”

“Miss Jane” by Brad Watson

Watson’s novel is based on the life of a great-aunt in rural Mississippi in the early 20th century who couldn’t have children and never married. In the Book Review, Amy Grace Loyd wrote: “Watson’s facility with upending expectations and upsetting the lines between all sorts of categories — good and bad, normal and abnormal, pride and shame, love and hate — is at its keenest and applied most carefully.”

“The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead

Whitehead’s time-hopping novel imagines the Underground Railroad as a literal mode of transportation. The book has been selected by Oprah Winfrey’s book club, and has spent eight weeks and counting on The Times’s best-seller list. Michiko Kakutani called it “a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery.” In the Book Review, Juan Gabriel Vásquez wrote: “In its exploration of the foundational sins of America, it is a brave and necessary book.”

“Another Brooklyn” by Jacqueline Woodson

Woodson is a celebrated writer of children’s books (“Brown Girl Dreaming” and many others), and this is her first novel for adults in 20 years. In it, an anthropologist returns home for the funeral of her father and is spurred to memories of her girlhood. In the Book Review, Tayari Jones called the novel “haunting” and “powerfully insightful.”

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The National Book Awards longlist for nonfiction:

(Update: The following books were announced as shortlist finalists for this award: “Strangers in Their Own Land” by Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Stamped From the Beginning” by Ibram X. Kendi, “Nothing Ever Dies” by Viet Thanh Nguyen, “The Other Slavery” by Andrés Reséndez and “Blood in the Water” by Heather Ann Thompson)

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“America’s War for the Greater Middle East” by Andrew J. Bacevich

The military historian Bacevich offers a history and critique of America’s militarized approach to the Middle East. In the Book Review, David Rohde said that Bacevich’s latest book “extends his string of brutal, bracing and essential critiques of the pernicious role of reflexive militarism in American foreign policy. As in past books, Bacevich is thought-provoking, profane and fearless.”

“The Firebrand and the First Lady” by Patricia Bell-Scott

The story of Eleanor Roosevelt’s long friendship with Pauli Murray, a black woman born in 1910 who was a poet, memoirist, lawyer, activist and Episcopal priest. Irin Carmon, in the Book Review, wrote: “Bell-Scott allows these women to speak for themselves, a light touch that works with two heavyweights.”

“Imbeciles” by Adam Cohen

Cohen revisits the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell, which upheld a statute that enabled the State of Virginia to sterilize “mental defectives.” On the cover of the Book Review, David Oshinsky called it “a superb history of eugenics in America.” Jennifer Senior felt the book was repetitive and disorganized, and wished Cohen spent “more time on the American obsession with the feebleminded — which is by far the richest, most fascinating, most horrifying aspect of his book — and less time in the courtroom.”

“Strangers in Their Own Land” by Arlie Russell Hochschild

In this unprecedented election year, Hochschild’s book takes a close look at Tea Party supporters in Louisiana. In the Book Review, Jason DeParle called it a “generous but disconcerting” work. “While her hopes of finding common political ground seem overly optimistic, this is a smart, respectful and compelling book.”

“Stamped From the Beginning” by Ibram X. Kendi

In his latest, the historian Kendi looks at the long history of racist thought in America, and how it has been used to enforce discrimination.

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“Nothing Ever Dies” by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize in April for his novel “The Sympathizer.” That book was set against the Vietnam War. In this nonfiction work, Nguyen looks closely at the war, and at how it was perceived by the various sides involved. Nguyen discussed his work on the Book Review’s podcast earlier this year.

“Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O’Neil

O’Neil’s book raises concern about the increasing role algorithms play in regulating people. Clay Shirky wrote: “Her knowledge of the power and risks of mathematical models, coupled with a gift for analogy, makes her one of the most valuable observers of the continuing weaponization of big data.”

“The Other Slavery” by Andrés Reséndez

This ambitious history looks at the centuries during which tens of thousands of Native Americans were enslaved, and the profound effect the practice had on Indian populations across North America.

“The Slave’s Cause” by Manisha Sinha

Sinha, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, aims to connect the war against slavery in the United States to other liberation movements. “It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive history of the abolitionist movement,” Ira Berlin wrote in the Book Review.

“Blood in the Water” by Heather Ann Thompson

Thompson’s account of the notorious Attica prison uprising in 1971 is one of the year’s most discussed works of history. “This is not an easy book to read — the countless episodes of inhumanity on these pages are heartbreaking,” James Forman Jr. wrote in the Book Review. “But it is an essential one.” Mark Oppenheimer wrote that “not all works of history have something to say so directly to the present,” but Thompson’s book, “which deals with racial conflict, mass incarceration, police brutality and dissembling politicians, reads like it was special-ordered for the sweltering summer of 2016.”

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5 Under 35

The National Book Foundation, which administers the National Book Awards, has also announced the winners of its annual 5 Under 35 honors, which recognize five especially promising debut fiction writers under the age of 35. This year’s winners are Brit Bennett (“The Mothers”), Yaa Gyasi (“Homegoing”), Greg Jackson (“Prodigals”), S. Li (“Transoceanic Lights”) and Thomas Pierce (“Hall of Small Mammals”).

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